Driving Into Places
It’s a confusing thing, returning home to a place where none of your furniture lives anymore.
Something happens inside: you see the street you used to walk down, the neighborhoods you used to pass by, the office you used to work in, and then you remember that this isn’t where you are any more. Something happens inside: you hear the sound that we call nostalgia drip, drip, dripping down into the insides of your heart. Something happens inside: you remember every time that you drove over bridges, accelerated under overpasses, and all the six packs of craft lager in the trunk of your car. Something happens inside: you feel the memory of someone you’ll never see again wrapped around your finger, the way that you can feel the gold band that you wear on your middle finger with your thumb, the way that you sometimes absentmindedly rub the tip of your nail on it, the way that you slide it up and down your finger when you are bored and sitting in a meeting.
I am not even sure that I can call it home. I am not sure that I have the right to use that word in this place anymore. I abandoned it, I left it behind, I got in a car and drove away, didn’t I? And yet it feels so familiar, so known, so worn down (but in a good way, like a pair of shoes that have molded to the shape of your feet, bunions and callouses and all).
What do you call that? A place that still lives in your heart even though you chose to not live in it anymore? What is the word for a place that sometimes makes your stomach hurt when you really stop and think about it? What’s the term for someone whom you still feel like you need someone else’s permission to fully miss?
Every time I drive through here, I try to take a different road. But then Google Maps chirps up a few miles outside of the city and says that it has found a faster path and would I like to save six minutes, and would I like to reroute myself?
I tap the checkmark on my phone and suddenly I am on a freeway with my foot resting near the brake. The car is set to cruise control and I’m not really paying attention to the things around me until I hear Maps tell me to take exit 53, and I find myself partway above the river, halfway to the harbor, with the shadow of bank buildings slowly emerging out of the distance as I drive closer, closer, closer to a city that once used to be my own.
It’s a comforting thing, coming back to a place that you remember growing up in — growing up, growing out, growing through and out of. Everything is tinged a shade of purple, as though when you go back to an old coffeeshop, an old classroom, an old dorm room, you are living in a dream — trapped in a memory of a place that once seemed so daunting but now, you realize, was never actually as scary as you imagined it to be when you walked into it for the very first time.
I don’t remember what it was like to not feel at home in this city, what it was like when I walked from one block to another wondering whether everyone could tell that I was a transplant from elsewhere, nervous that they’d be able to smell the scent of uncertainty on the edges of my shirtsleeves as I reached my hand out to shake theirs, hoping that they wouldn’t notice that I was just trying to mirror their actions in mine.
Some places always welcome you with open arms, whisper into your ear as you’re waiting for the F train at Broadway-Lafayette: even if you leave me, I’ll still be here the day that you decide to come back.
This city is one of those places. Whenever I drive into it, I have to cross over a bridge or through a tunnel, as if I am the one who is paying her dues, allowing the island to lift me into the air or suffocate me under water, all so that I can prove once again that yes, I left you before, but now I actually want to come back, I actually want to be here.
Cross the Verrazano, over the George Washington, under the Lincoln, and emerge like a child coming up from an underwater tea party at the bottom of a swimming pool for a breath of fresh air. Each time, a different view of steel giants that twinkle with desk lamps of people who are working late, burning midnight oil, typing away furiously in their corner offices, waiting for a delivery from Seamless.
Once I pass Greenwood and take my exit off of the Gowanus Expressway, I can’t really pay attention to the skyscrapers of downtown Brooklyn. I’m too focused on braking for the red, pausing for the stop signs, waiting for strollers and dogs to finish crossing the street before propelling forward for the greens.
I keep trying to figure out if I need to wait for something, or if I can go ahead. And each time that I push down the pedal, every time that I make a hard brake, whenever I pause in the bike lane while trying to find a spot long enough to parallel park on my block: the case of red wine in the back seat shifts from side to side.
It’s a painful thing, going home to a place that is no longer yours.
I always find myself driving into places I used to live. I always seem to end up on street corners where I stood before — sometimes alone, sometimes with you/you/you/you.
What do you call that? The thing where you know that a place/person is physically the same — same two streets intersecting, same two people that once touched foreheads as a way to say: even if you leave me, I’ll still be here the day that you decide to come back — but they feel different from the heart? What is the word for knowing that you can’t really go back somewhere because you can’t have the place/person you have now and also have the one that used to be yours?
What is the term for someone that you used to call home? And what’s the word that means: I am not even sure why I ever thought that he was home to begin with?
